InformationWeek

Van Waters & Rogers uses PlaceWare for strategy sessions, information-sharing meetings, and training. The transition from a face-to-face meeting to a Web conference is easier than the transition for training applications, Miazga says. "For training, people are used to leaving the business site. [With PlaceWare,] since they're sitting at their own desks, they have the added impact of disruptions. People think you're still available since you're still there."

Even for traditional meetings, Miazga says presenters need to change their style. "You have to make the presentations very media intensive," he says. "You should ask a polling question every three to five minutes," to give the participants something to respond to. "You have to change the screen every minute or so to hold their attention," he adds. "It requires different facilitation skills."

Although it's Web-based, Web conferencing isn't free. The phone call costs and the seat charge for PlaceWare is $400 per year for the hosted offering. A 100-seat server is also available for $40,000. Because seats aren't named-user licenses, if you buy 10 seats, any 10 people in the company can be in a PlaceWare meeting at any given time. MyPlaceWare, a scaled-down version for small groups, is offered online for free.

Real-time collaboration is a burgeoning sector of the collaboration-tools market. Collaborative Strategies estimates that PlaceWare and other real-time collaboration tools (audio, video, and data) have penetrated only 5% of the potential market; the market experienced a 111% growth rate in 1999 to an overall market of $6.2 billion, with a 64% annual growth rate predicted through 2002.

Collaboration tools can also differ in how they're delivered to the customer. In the collaboration-tool market, the application service providermodel has caught on very quickly. Some tools, such as Integrated Application Technologies Inc.'s Internet Office distributed project-management software, are available only over the Internet.

Many companies offering tools that users can install (or download from the Web) on their desktops also offer hosting services. For example, eRoom is available through eRoom.net, hosted online, and is priced according to usage. Wharton's Ditto says that upgrading to eRoom 4.0, which lets students access rooms with only a browser, from 3.0, which required downloading Windows-based software onto a client, increased student adoption of the technology. "Lowering the barriers to using a product is critical," he says.

In spite of the success of Web conferencing and other Web-based collaboration tools, not everyone is enamored of the technology. "The latency in the Internet"--the time it can take for the browser to refresh, even in so-called real time--"gets in the way of my being engaged in the process," Ogdin says. Real-time tools don't capture the natural rhythms of a spoken dialog.

Van Waters & Rogers' Miazga is realistic about the limitations of his technologies. Although PlaceWare has helped him reduce travel costs while increasing communication, Miazga says that Web conferencing and videoconferencing won't supplant all face-to-face meetings and training. "The online synchronous connection is simply another tool to be used appropriately," he says. "It's not a wholesale replacement" for human contact.

In Coleman's view, the proliferation of collaboration tools during the past two years is just the beginning. "In the first 10 years of the 2000s, we'll see the same kind of explosion in interpersonal productivity tools," he says, citing personal-productivity tools such as Microsoft Office as a market that experienced similar growth during the 1990s.

Consider these figures: Some 3,500 students have already worked on group projects in Wharton's WebCafe implementation of eRoom. When these students enter the workplace, they'll be bringing their experience--and their expectations--with them, perhaps inspiring the rest of us.

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